Summary

The painting shows a grey stallion in a landscape. The picture would have been
commissioned by a patron as a portrait of his horse, although the names of the animal and its owner are now unknown. Stubbs's earlier works usually depicted horses with a groom, jockey or owner, whereas his paintings of the 1780s and 1790s often showed
a single animal in a landscape.

Display caption

This composition, showing a grey stallion in a dark wooded landscape, is unusually simple for Stubbs, as it is not enlivened by a luminous landscape or any human presence. The stark contrast between the light horse and the dark background is reminiscent of some of his ‘Horse and Lion’ paintings, when he included a white horse under attack in a cavernous landscape.

Stubbs did not limit himself to one painting method but was continually searching for other media. The technique adopted here is experimental: an unusual mixture of beeswax and pine resin, without any drying oil, on a wooden panel.